Customer Service – Online Self-Fixes Are Broken

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Only 14% of customer service and support issues are fully resolved in online self-service, according to a survey by Gartner. Even for issues that customers describe as ‘very simple’, only 36% resolve fully without assistance.  

“While 73% of customers use self-service at some point in their customer service journey, it’s concerning to see that so few fully resolve there,” says Eric Keller, a senior director of research in the Gartner customer service & support practice. “It’s imperative that customer service and support leaders work to resolve the issues customers face in order to fully realise the value of their self-service investments.”

Customers frustrated by ineffective self-service solutions

• Customers feel a disconnect between the issues they want to solve and the capabilities that self-service can offer. Forty-five percent of customers who started in self-service said the company didn’t understand what they were trying to do. Furthermore, the most common reason for self-service failure was that in 43% of cases, customers couldn’t find content relevant to their issue.

• “Customers feel frustrated by self-service journeys that feel too rigid to deal with the complexities of their service issues,” says Keller. “Self-service can offer substantial benefits for organisations and customers, yet work is required to ensure that customers' needs are understood and responded to.”

• He says in order to improve self-service resolution, customer service and support leaders should:

• Scale and maintain self-service content by expanding content creation responsibilities to reps, enabling them to create knowledge as part of the issue resolution workflow, rather than as a separate process.

• Invest in proactive delivery of self-service solutions by using customer account, interaction and product usage data to predict customer needs.

• Simplify the resolution path on their website with a single digital concierge, such as a GenAI chatbot, positioned as the most prominent entry point to the customer journey.

• Assess and improve the performance of self-service content continuously – for example, by allowing both customers and reps to flag ineffective content and establishing ongoing processes for improving content quality.

“The realities of self-service journeys, which have many potential paths to a solution, varying expectations for content and constantly evolving issue types – have limited the success of organisations’ self-service investments,” says Keller. “Companies need to capture, diagnose and predict customer intent in self-service and match them with the best-fit solution.”

Picture: A Gartner survey has found that only 14% of customer service issues are fully resolved in self-service.

www.gartner.com

Article written by Cathryn Ellis
22nd August 2024

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